Scull Sessions

By Chris Solomon

Published: July 22, 2001

ON THE WATER

By H. M. van den Brink.

Translated by Paul Vincent.

134 pp. New York:

Grove Press. $21.

HERE is a writer whose mind's eye sees the world from behind the lens of a camera. In fact, the word ''cinematic'' comes to the reader's own mind repeatedly over the course of H. M. van den Brink's slender novel about a young rower's magical summer in prewar Amsterdam. Van den Brink, the editor in chief of the VPRO television network in the Netherlands, lingers on scenes of water shimmering like fish scales under the sun. He zooms in for tight shots that capture the vigorous grace of young men at their oars. Even his characters and plot recall tales from the big screen, though it's hard to make the people vivid in a book so slim that it passes as quickly as a film short.

''On the Water'' is narrated in a series of flashbacks by Anton, an overly sheltered, if underloved, boy sentenced to an adolescence in a public housing project. His jailers are a mousy mother and a pusillanimous father, the sort of colorless man Anton fears he will one day become. The son recalls watching his father arrive home after work, dressed in the dark gray uniform of the tram company. He soaks his feet in a bunion bath and nervously sips his coffee ''like an animal that is glad to have reached its lair but still can scarcely believe it is safe.''

In Amsterdam it's hard to keep even a cloistered boy from the water, and Anton soon falls in love with the nearby river, with its punts and scows, its straw-hatted men drinking cool drinks on the far shore and its rowers' clubhouse, which ''was repainted white every spring so that it could reflect itself like a swan with new feathers -- so beautiful, so elegant, so unattainable.'' Anton manages to gain admission to the club's novice crew team. Though awkward in his plimsolls and woolen shorts, he is tapped by a mysterious instructor, Doktor Schneiderhahn, to train for the two-man scull known as the coxless pair, ''the dragonfly among rowing boats, sometimes unsteady in its movements but always graceful, with oars that seemed too long for its slender hull.'' His partner is David, a self-possessed and affluent young man who will arouse what for Anton will be a life-altering friendship -- one with a strong, if unexplored, sexual undercurrent.

Rowing has inspired several excellent works of nonfiction, including David Halberstam's 1985 book, ''The Amateurs,'' but few fiction writers have exploited the sport's possibilities for metaphor. Men rowing together in a scull, Anton notes, form an ''unstable construction of trust.'' A poorly maneuvered shell is a study in complicity, but when rowers are in synchrony, physical boundaries of skin and wood collapse -- a brief transcendence called ''swing.'' ''It was as if I could feel David's arms and legs,'' Anton recalls in such a moment, ''as if the boat between us disappeared.''

Soon it is the summer of 1939, with its parade of lemony days and weekend regattas that the boys win. And win. The rowers and Schneiderhahn talk of the future Olympics. Now Anton's formerly monochromatic existence is rinsed in a technicolor glow of sunshine and bright pennants. The change is one of several visual contrasts -- movement versus stillness; summer versus winter -- that van den Brink works into his scenes. Nowhere is the writer-as-cinematographer more apparent, though, than in the depiction of the first time the rowers achieve swing, which occurs during a theatrical cloudburst.

The plot of ''On the Water'' -- ugly duckling from the wrong side of the river achieves athletic success and manhood -- seems derivative of ''Chariots of Fire'' and countless Hollywood dramas. Yet in Paul Vincent's translation it is nonetheless entertaining, in the way that a fairy tale loses nothing for its predictability. The novel could benefit, however, from better development of a supporting cast.

Tall, dark and handsome David is supposed to be Anton's major influence, yet he is a less-than-minor presence, as out of sight for readers as he is for Anton when rowing behind him in the coxless pair. Doktor Schneiderhahn, meanwhile, is not so much enticingly enigmatic as incompletely sketched. Is this outsider indeed a German in Amsterdam in the months before Hitler's invasion? Or is he a Jew? In this tale where the antagonist is time, van den Brink could have better used Schneiderhahn's situation to foreshadow the end of the boys' idyll on the water, instead of relying on increasingly disruptive flashbacks to inject tension. For that change, we may just have to wait for the movie.